TITLE: Editing and the Illusion of Thought
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 26, 2014  8:32 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Martin Amis, in <EM>The Paris Review</EM>,
<A HREF="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1156/the-art-of-fiction-no-151-martin-amis">
    The Art of Fiction No. 151</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 By the way, it's all nonsense about how wonderful computers are
 because you can shift things around.  Nothing compares with the
 fluidity of longhand.  You shift things around without shifting
 them around--in that you merely indicate a possibility while
 your original thought is still there.  The trouble with a computer
 is that what you come out with has no memory, no provenance,
 no history--the little cursor, or whatever it's called, that
 wobbles around the middle of the screen falsely gives you the
 impression that you're thinking.  Even when you're not.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

My immediate reaction was that Mr. Amis needs version control, but
there is something more here.

When writing with pencil and paper, we work on an artifact that
embodies the changes it has gone through.  We see the marks and
erasures; we see the sentence where it once was once at the same
time we see the arrow telling us where it now belongs.  When writing
in a word processor, our work appears complete, even timeless, though
we know it isn't.  Mark-up mode lets us see some of the document's
evolution, but the changes feel more distant from our minds.  They
live out there.

I empathize with writers like Amis, whose experience predates the
computer.  Longhand feels different.  Teasing out what what was
valuable, even essential, in previous experience and what was merely
the limitation of our tools is one of the great challenges of any
time.  How do we make new tools that are worth the change, that enable
us to do more and better?
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